3 Software Reusable Artifacts Evolution: A Three Levels of Abstraction Framework

Abstract

AbstractThe software crisis is still going on but is nowadays, more critical than ever as organizations cannot exist without operational software. Ramifications of the software crisis are both economic and social. In that context, software reuse is a key technology which permits organization to cope with many aspects of the software crisis (maintenance costs and development cycle times reduction, software systems quality increase). However, despite the potential benefits of software reuse, current reuse methods, techniques and tools fail to improve the software development process productivity and the software products quality. In particular, existing software technology doesn't take into account the organizational aspects of the software reuse process complexity. In this paper, we propose a three‐ levels of abstraction (conceptual, organizational, technical) framework to describe the reusable artifacts evolution activity. The conceptual level lists the main tasks of the evolution activity and the data flows they exchange. The organizational level describes the actors contributing to the evolution activity and the evolution tasks carried out by each actor. The technical level emphasizes the version control problems resulting from reusable artifacts evolution and defines a set of basic rules to cope with these problems.